June 14, 2013
Friday AM

There is no evidence that length of sentences in prisons is correctional. Although the sign out front states this is a correctional facility. Just the opposite. Long sentences demoralizes prisoners; fact: it costs taxpayers a ton of money: $20K per person, PER YEAR!! A good college doesn't cost that much. Why the deficit spending Congress asks? Here's one reason! And we really can't afford it, there's more than two million prisoners.

An official for FAMM, famlies against mandatory minimums, said she asked the retiring director of all federal prisons what was an ideal sentencing length for correction. Twelve to eighteen months was her answer. We are so far from correctional reform. Politicians have caused this dilemma. Reform cannot happen without their help.

Well, then, how can it change? Let's look at Norway, for instance. And they are not the only country having lower costs and shorter sentences. Remedial classes make violators better citizens. It works and lessens recidivism.

Some prisoners are mental problems from the git-go; and in that case they need hospitalization and not to be in with other more normal prisoners. In our system of plea bargaining, it needs to be said, there are far too many who are innocent and really need no remedial programs. Occasionally there is a new DNA proof releasing prisoners after years of wrongly incarceration.

The mentally ill, however, may never get out, unless they, too, can change. At present they will either kill themselves or another cellmate, and wind up in solitary.

Plea bargaining was a lawyers idea to save the state time and money. Prior to plea bargaining the numbers of caseload backlog became intolerable. The justice system was on the brink, about to collapse. Plea bargaining saved the day but at the defendant s expense: not the lawyers, not the judges the defendant s expense.

True Justice sort of slowly went away with plea bargaining. Lawyers, and especially public defenders, tell the client they have no chance to prove their innocence, and if it goes to trial, you are told, the judge will give you a much longer sentence. He will give you the max due to the expense of the state having a trial by jury. Doesn t that usurp the constitutional right of a person to be judged by their peers? Does anyone realize that is an erosion of freedom here?

Sentencing is too long, trials are too long and there is no expense placed on the lawyers for in-house delays that they cause. Those delays are the real cause of how the court became backlogged in the first place. The trials take too long. The system stinks. No one even wants to serve on a jury.

The judges don't get paid by the number of trials they have. The public defenders and judges who appoint them are in a strange relationship in that the judge can assign far too many cases to a few public defenders, and the lawyer does not have time to fully represent the innocent. He has to convince numbers of defendants to accept a plea bargain, whether they are guilty or not.

Even the judges don't like the mandatory minimum sentence plan mandated by the legislature. The judges retort What do you need me for, as I have little or no flexibility in sentencing.

For the slightest infraction the guy gets five years. Guilty!

I talked with one African American mother and her son was doing five years for having a pair of brass knuckles in his pocket (a deadly weapon the law calls it) as he happened to be near a crime scene and got searched. He didn t have anything to do with the crime.

Actually, there is supposed to be a balance of powers in the three branches of government: executive, legislative and judicial.

Here, the judicial has been preempted by the legislature who demands minimum sentences by passing the law.

In California the three-strikes law was and is a disaster. In twenty years it filled up the prisons and bankrupted the state. Everyone just blames a movie star governor. All those people who should have been working and helping to pay taxes, sat motionless, and meaninglessly in jail. Now motr than two million.

Do the crime, do the time. In the modern day of satellite tracking that is an ignorant presumption. Norway uses that type of prisoner monitoring technique where people continue to work and be part of a family. Our system destroys the structure of family and community-- that all the teachers, all the schools, the policemen, the peacekeepers, and all the elected officials are trying daily to improve.

Long sentences cause divorce, it destroys families--causes hardship on the people who didn t do anything wrong. For example, no fathers at home no brothers no mothers! It contributes negatively to community integrity, it aggravates hopeless inmates who usually wind up frustrated in solitary.

By the way that only costs ten thousand more per year if it is a privatized institution, run by contractors who are guaranteed an occupancy level and who do their best to see that the prisoner comes back that s called job security and it may explain why recidivism runs so high when privatized.

There are, by far, more men in prison than women. Overcrowding is illegal, but it goes on and on. California Supreme Court ruled overcrowding is cruel and unusual punishment against the constitution-- and ordered Gov. Brown to release several thousand people by a certain date. The federal prisons are just as crowded and may get worse. Taking a case to the supreme court is much more difficult. The supreme court can pick and choose what cases they will hear.

Crowding cell mates cause racial and non-racial anxieties which results in more violence, more solitary confinement or even riots. When the stress of overcrowding increases, its only a matter of time until the riots come. Then that translates into longer sentences, extensions for paroles, and prisoners in more secluded confinement.

Privatizing prison management is a definite conflict of interest and needs to be abandoned. The contractor is more interested in the income factor than being benevolently concerned about prisoner s rehabilitation and being successfully reintroduced into employment and society.

One statistic reported that the feds have built halfway houses for prisoners in transition. They have built the buildings, furnished them fully, and about a third of them stand empty why?

Just try to get an answer on that one.

There is a higher percent of Americans in prison, than most other countries. And Is this national failure expensive? At least $20K per head per year if they stay in good health, which they often don t. There s now over two million people incarcerated in the U.S.

Any ideas?

Norway: a country of almost six million people had 3,866 prisoners on Jan 1, 2011. The longest sentence ever was twenty one years.

The average sentence is 75 days. Thirty percent was for drugs, 22 percent crimes for profit, 21 percent violent crimes the rest is other crimes. Compare that to the U S with 2 million incarcerated. The average sentence is about ten years. Recidivism is fifty three percent for males, and thirty nine percent for females. Norway is approximately 20 percent recidivism.

The biggest differences are prison comforts, quality of life and benefits, i.e., activities, sports and remedial classes and physical health.

U.S. prisons don't feed good health food meals either, and usually don't require inmates to exercise. Many are overweight as a result.

The management buys food that is more thrifty and usually fattening. Medical and dental needs are slowly processed due to overcrowding.

Oh, is there ever racism ? More blacks that all other ethnic groups combined. Sentences for people of color are three to four times longer than white inmates.

One man raising medical weed got fifteen years.

Plea bargaining is a gross failure too. Innocent people go to jail because lawyers tell them they don t have a chance to win, especially if it is not a first offense. They compromise.

What can you do about this? Talk to your friends. Learn more about other prisons that work better than ours. Get rid of old medieval mores, Do the Crime--Do the time.

Leo Baldwin
Lompoc, CA

Ketchikan, Alaska

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